Meteorological summer has been one of extremes in the U.S. Overall, the East has been wet while the West has baked in the heat. These types of extremes, which are set up by a consistent jet stream pattern, are amplified by a warming climate. Many locations in the Middle Atlantic, Ohio Valley, and Upper Midwest had one of their 10 wettest summers

The U.S. has come a long way in cleaning up its air. The Clean Air Act of 1970 made air pollution catastrophes like the 1948 smog that killed nearly 40 people near Pittsburgh a distant memory. But while the air is much cleaner overall, smoke from wildfires is threatening the progress that’s been made, as particulate pollution from wildfires has

Climate change is increasing the trend in weather and climate extremes in the U.S. A NOAA/NCEI report indicates that through September, the U.S. has had 15 individual billion-dollar weather disasters in 2017. Only 2011 had more billion-dollar disasters with 16, and that was through the entire year. Even without the final calculations from Harvey,

Large wildfires are becoming more frequent and widespread in the western U.S. Smoke from these fires is undermining decades of progress in reducing air pollution from tailpipes, power plants, and other industrial sources in many areas. Large fires are becoming more common and severe, and the smoke from these fires has serious public health impact

Harvey and Irma have brought devastating floods to Texas and Florida, while severe to exceptional drought has contributed to wildfires in Montana and the Pacific Northwest. These types of weather and climate extremes are trending upward, as indicated by the NCEI Climate Extremes Index. In addition to accounting for drought and hurricane winds, the

With fire season starting to ramp up, we are again reminded of a clear trend that has emerged in the western U.S. in recent decades. We are experiencing larger and more frequent wildfires. The metric most frequently used to quantify this trend is area burned, or how large in terms of acres or hectares a given fire’s scorching fingertips managed

Fire season is here. Following a very wet winter, we are in the midst of a surprisingly active fire season. As of Monday, a total of 987,000 acres have burned in 2017 across the Northwest, encompassing the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. This comes as a surprise because fire season outlooks issued just a couple months ago called

The West is ablaze as the summer wildfire season has gotten off to an intense start. More than 37,000 fires have burned more than 5.2 million acres nationally since the beginning of the year, with 47 large fires burning across nine states as of Friday. The relatively early activity is quickly becoming the norm, with rising temperatures making the

Wildfires have burned more than 4.5 million acres in the U.S. so far in 2017. That’s 38 percent more than the average acreage burned for the year-to-date over the past decade. And it is the third largest area burned by wildfires in the last decade through late July. The bulk of U.S. wildfires burn in the western half of the country because soils

From Phoenix to Boise, high temperature records fell like dominoes over the weekend as an impressive heat wave engulfed the western U.S., helping to fuel several wildfires. While heat waves are a regular part of summer weather, the steady warming of the planet means those heat waves are getting ever hotter, making record heat more and more likely

Two opposing weather situations are playing out right now in the Southeast: While parts of North Carolina are submerged thanks to a record downpour, Florida is battling wildfires fueled by a drought that now outranks the one in California. While these conditions sit at opposite ends of the weather seesaw, both may be affected by a changing climate.

When Jeff Prestemon stepped outside his home near Raleigh, N.C., last Friday around 9 a.m., the skies were clear, the air “perfectly breathable.” But just an hour-and-a-half later, the winds had shifted, drawing with them the smoke from regional wildfires. “It was putrid,” Prestemon, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service, said. “It stung